AWS recently announced that Amazon EventBridge Event Bus supports AWS AppSync as an Event Bus's target, enabling developers to stream real-time updates such as sports scores from their applications to frontend applications, including mobile and desktop.
Amazon EventBridge is a serverless event bus that allows AWS services, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), and custom applications to communicate with each other using events. Within the service, developers can set up rules to determine where to send their data, allowing applications to react to changes in your data as they occur.
EventBridge includes two ways to process events: event buses and pipes. An event bus is a router that receives events and delivers them to zero or more destinations or targets. One of the targets the EventBridge service supports is AWS AppSync - a fully-managed service that enables developers to build digital experiences based on real-time data. Earlier, the company supported publishing events from AppSync to Amazon EventBridge.
Amazon Event Bus Overview (Source: EventBridge Event bus documentation)
AppSync as a target, when integrated with EventBridge's enhanced end-to-end latencies, enables developers to easily stream near real-time data from their applications to various endpoints, including enterprise applications, web and mobile apps, IoT devices, and real-time dashboards.
Nick Smit, a principal product manager for Amazon EventBridge, explained in a tweet on X:
AppSync makes it easy to do WebSocket subscriptions (even if you aren't familiar with GraphQL). With our latency improvements on the event bus and WebSocket publishers and consumers, I think there are some really compelling architectures we can build. Events stream in from a WebSocket client to the bus, consumers on the bus react to those events and process them, and then emit events back to the bus that are picked up by the WebSocket client. This removes all of the tight coupling between frontend and backend that typically happens over synchronous API calls today.
Since its inception, the company has significantly invested in the service with features like schema registry, scheduler, and pipes reported on InfoQ earlier. The support for AWS AppSync as an Event Bus's target is another one welcomed by the community.
Yan Cui, an AWS Serverless Hero, tweeted:
Nice, EventBridge now supports AppSync as a target. This is super useful for those times when you need to notify users of some background things happening via subscriptions.
Lastly, AppSync as a target is available at no additional charge for customers across all AWS Regions where EventBridge and AppSync are available. More information is available in the EventBridge documentation and AppSync documentation.
